The Southend Urban Area is the informal name for the urban area including and surrounding Southend-on-Sea in Essex, England. The ONS defines the Southend Urban Area as having a population of 269,400, making it the largest urban area within the East of England. Its population has grown nearly 1% from the 1991 figure of 266,749

It includes the following places:

Southend-on-Sea borough has a population of 160,257, although during the summer months numbers in the town are swelled significantly by tourists - the figures for 2004, for instance, show that 6.43 million visitors made their way to the Southend-on-sea area over the course of that year.

The postcode for Southend Urban Area is SS.

Coordinates: 51°32′39″N 0°40′12″E / 51.5443°N 0.6700°E / 51.5443; 0.6700

An urban area is characterized by higher population density and vast human features in comparison to areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets.

Urban areas are created and further developed by the process of urbanization. Measuring the extent of an urban area helps in analyzing population density and urban sprawl, and in determining urban and rural populations.^{[citation needed]}

Unlike an urban area, a metropolitan area includes not only the urban area, but also satellite cities plus intervening rural land that is socio-economically connected to the urban core city, typically by employment ties through commuting, with the urban core city being the primary labor market. In fact, urbanized areas agglomerate and grow as the core population/economic activity center within a larger metropolitan area or envelope.

In the US, Metropolitan areas tend to be defined using counties or county sized political units as building blocks of much larger, albeit more condensed population units. Counties tend to be stable political boundaries; economists prefer to work with economic and social statistics based on metropolitan areas. Urbanized areas are a more relevant statistic for determining per capita land usage and densities.^{[citation needed]}

Urban Blitz is best known for his "eerie and atmospheric" (Ira Robbins) electric violin, baritone violectra and lead guitar work with the 1970s London protopunk art rock band Doctors of Madness.

However, Blitz had considerable earlier musical experience, graduating from a classical background to hone his skills on the London late 1960s, and early 1970s club and pub rock scene. He travelled to Italy in early 1973, to play with the Neapolitan Italian / Celtic chanteuse, Jenny Sorrenti. He lived and rehearsed with Sorrenti's band, 'Saint Just', in the ‘House on the Lake’ on Lake Bracciano, that led to the album of the same name (La Casa del Lago) but before the recording, Blitz left Italy to join the Doctors of Madness in June 1974.

With Doctors of Madness, Blitz further developed his unique counterpoint electric violin style, incorporating a garage rock edge to complement the Doctor's nihilistic, manic, approach to rock music;^{[citation needed]} using fuzz box, wah-wah pedal, phasing, echoplex and reverberation to appropriate effect. He cited avant garde violinists Jean-Luc Ponty, Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris and John Cale of the Velvet Underground as his main influences; having largely rejected his early classical training.